Using your experiences on this project and relating your programmes to other webisodes you have researched, discuss how taking account of the online audience affects the process of showing creative work
The effect of audiences with an online project with all processes can affect an outcome in different ways. Although the audience feedback is very important, if it wasn’t for the internet and such sites as YouTube or Facebook, I couldn’t have got much of following for our web series, as without this technology our viewing audience would be very limited. I would have had to pay for screenings of our web series in local cinemas. Or held such events in local establishments to be able to get the audience feedback needed.
For the start of this project I first started out with researching about other web series, the one I watched the most was The Guild, which even though I don’t play and never have played the game which the series is based upon, I was attracted to it by the sort of “nerdy” humour which I sometimes find really funny. This web series as really tired to attract a specific audience, which is a person who play or understand World of Warcraft. They have really tried to create a sort of online TV program, as it has most of the ele
ments needed to be classed as one. Even though the episodes are short, they always seem to follow the same suit, which to a following is very good as there is not much change. The only downside to this is that if you start mid series, you don’t really get what’s going on. I had to go back and watch the first few to really see what this series was about. In our web series we played upon the idea of including internet humour for games or anything to do with the web in general, but I thought that would keep our options quite limited and would only attract a certain audience. Which I was trying to appeal to as many as I can, so this idea was dropped.Due to a low budget we couldn’t advertise in newspapers or on TV. Yet again, thanks to the internet I was able to promote and advertise our series. From set up groups on Facebook, advertising to an audience so they will watch our first episode. To tweeting on Twitter, a quick update every day reminding people to watch the webisode once it was released. This was a quick and easy way to promot
e, and most importantly, t
his method was completely free. Thanks to this method of advertising, I didn’t just get viewers from the UK; we also got a few from the United States, and a few in Spain, which was quite surprising. This shows the importance of the Internet in the “modern world” as without it, the world would feel a much bigger place. But now we can chat with people from other countries in seconds.Audience feedback was vital to our project, as without it, I really couldn’t have moved forward for more episodes. After the first episode was aired, I got quite a few comments all suggesting different problems and solutions with the series. The main problem with the first one was that the sound was too quiet, because of this feedback I was able to overcome this issue and I was given proper boom mic poles, so I could correctly sound u
p the characters for a louder episode. Which was a big improvement for episode 2. After episode 2, I was told by an audience that two of the characters looked too similar. So I decided to tweek one of the characters costumes to include a hoodie, this distinguished the two characters a lot better, making the audience happy.Even though we have over 700 views to our first video, I still believe that this is very small. This video is the most popular on YouTube has 136,396,904 views at the time I wrote this, and all it is, is some weird guy dancing:
It shows that even though some people think 700 is a lot, there can be so much more. This was only our first episode. The other two have a lot less hits: Here is the view count for each Episode
Episode1:
Episode2:
Episode3:
This is showing that people get excited over new things, but after the first one, people just tend to think, oh it will like the other one, and stop watching, this is why I should of promoted by a brief outline of the episode before hand to make it sound exciting to an audience, I guess that is something to think about for future projects.
To summaries, I believe without the internet, such projects like this one cannot work as well and I could not get the audience feedback received during the project. Audience feedback is curtail for any series, TV or online, as is shows what the viewer really thinks, and If you don’t listen to them, you wont appeal to their needs and they will stop watching, if I was to continue with more episodes on Lines, I would defiantly take onboard what the audience were asking for, and manipulate the series to meet most of their requirement’s.
